The removal of resources, such as oil, natural gas, and other hydrocarbons, from a subterranean reservoir may be assisted by creating a zone of fractures in the rock around a wellbore to allow the hydrocarbon resources to flow through the fractures to the wellbore in a process commonly called hydraulic fracturing stimulation. The hydraulic fracturing process involves injecting a fracturing fluid including water, proppant particles (e.g., sand), and chemicals into wellbores under high pressure. The fracturing fluid penetrates small cracks and natural fractures in the reservoir and causes larger fractures emanating from the wellbores. Hydraulic fracturing can be used to extract hydrocarbon resources from shale rock, coal beds, and other hard, low-permeability subterranean layers from which it was previously considered difficult, if not impossible, to extract hydrocarbon resources.
Effective use of hydraulic fracturing involves well design, fracture design, and dynamic fluid production design over an operational lifetime of a well pad (from which the wellbores are drilled). Inappropriately designed hydraulic fracturing designs, well drilling plans, or production schedules can result in poor resource production, such as flow rate and cumulative amount of the resource extracted, and a reduced net worth or present value of the well pad lease. The poor resource production may be due to well communication or poor contact with the reservoir. A development fracturing design and schedule more customized to the reservoir and generated using a better design process can result in better resource production and a greater new worth or present value of the well pad lease relative to the inappropriately designed drilling plans and production schedules. Presently, development design and production schedules for hydraulic fractured-based resource production require a significant amount of time to develop. In addition, some operators have attempted to increase productivity of the asset or well pad by increasing the density of wells in an area by downspacing (reducing the spacing) between wells in a newly purchased lease or drilling additional wells in current existing leases. But, increasing the well density may cause the wells to interact in the subsurface, resulting in a less than optimal resource output that does not justify the cost of drilling additional wells. Furthermore, present methods of generating extraction schedules may not consider the entire operational lifetime of the well pad, so the extraction schedules may become stale (e.g., less relevant and accurate) over time, resulting in reduced resource extraction over the lifetime of the well pad.